I’m a true foodie. I love cookbooks. I love developing recipes. But today I’m not sharing a recipe. I’m sharing ABOUT recipes.
I’ve been cooking and collecting since I was a child. I’ve been writing and publishing recipe books since 1990. I have an entire bookcase of cookbooks and recipes–not counting the untold files on my computer that have never been printed out.
It’s time to find a more automated way of keeping track of them. I knew there had to be “an App for that”. I went looking. I tried all the free trials I could find. I downloaded the free iPhone/ iPad ones. I paid for one that didn’t have a trial–both for Mac and iPad version. Ouch!
My perfect app would be one that:
- is designed for very easily adding my own recipes. (I don’t need a ton more recipes that don’t fit the way I cook. But I do need a FAST way to get my recipes in.)
- allows me to add my own categories. (I don’t prepare food traditionally, so I don’t organize by traditional categories.)
- allows me to customize the look and layout. (at least to some degree. Visuals are very important to me.)
- allows me to very easily pull together meal plans, for all meals (and, ideally, for me to be able to customize those meals.)
- works cross platform, with corresponding iPhone/iPad app, so I can add recipes and meal plans to those and have them automatically all sync together, and so I can prep food from my iPad in the kitchen. (Reading the recipe to me would be nice, but not a deal breaker.)
- includes a grocery list maker. This is not a deal breaker for me, since I mainly “cook” from our pantry, since we shop monthly from a natural food delivery. But it would be a nice, and probably expected, feature.
- includes nutritional information? This is not a deal breaker for me at all, but again it could be a nice feature for writing my recipe books.
- links back to original recipe, if online? Again, not a deal breaker, but nice to be able to go back to the source, especially for sharing with others.
What’d I find?
Come back tomorrow and find out!
